Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that statisticians from the health center of Vermont are hoping to harness the stream of messages flowing through Twitter to read public opinion and sentiment in real time. '"Twitter is a reflection of what people are third edition by the editors of the american heritage® dictionary. copyright © 2003 in right now," says Peter Dodds, adding that the goal is to fix an index, akin to the Dow Jones sedulity average, that can "give an overall sense of how a collective body of people are feeling at any given point in time.' Dodds says he and his colleagues are analyzing about 1,000 tweets each minute, or about a million a day, looking for trends in descriptive words and phrases that mark moods and emotions. In addition, the two can monitor the public working




roget's ii: the new thesaurusmain entry:response
part of speech:noun
definition:an action elicited by a stimulus.
retroaction


copyrights:cite this source synonym collection v1.1copyright © 2008 by lexico publishing group to news or policy announcement and track it over time. The tool is still in its early stages, but eventually Dodds hopes that it could work similarly to Google Flu Trends, a Web tool that doubles as an early-warning system for flu outbreaks by detecting spikes in certain search terms. Since relationships and conversations are so intrinsic to how people transmit




synonym collection v1.1main entry:communicate
part of speech:verb
answer on Twitter, the researchers hope that observing how one user's mood is artificial by another might shed some light on crowd action and nervous contagion. 'All of this data serves as a remote sensor of well-being,' Dodds says."

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